Guild Wars Prophecies
Encyclopedia
Guild Wars: Prophecies officially known as simply Guild Wars, is the first campaign of the Guild Wars
series of Action RPG
s, developed by the Seattle
-based ArenaNet
game developer studio, a subsidiary of South Korea
n game publisher NCsoft
. Prophecies introduced players to the world of Guild Wars, known as Tyria, and premiered several elements that are now known as core components of the Guild Wars games.
Like all Guild Wars campaigns, Prophecies contains a co-operative role-playing portion and a competitive Player versus Player
(PvP) portion. Co-operative characters may be used in the competitive portion, or new PvP-specific characters may be created at maximum level
and all skills unlocked to the accounts.
Warrior : A melee weapon-wielding character with a high armor level specializing in melee attacks. Unlike many MMOs where melee classes are often used as "tanks", the Warrior's specialty is offense, due to their primary attribute increasing the effectiveness of their attacks, with well-designed builds giving them the highest overall DPS in the game. Their energy management relies on "adrenal skills" which are skills that are charged up by attacking foes, rather than requiring energy to use.
Ranger : A bow-wielding character of high resilience specializing in ranged attacks, utility, and disruption. Also able to be accompanied by a pet.
Monk : A spellcasting profession specializing in defensive and healing arts. A key element to the monk lies in their Protection Prayers line, which eliminates the need for a typical MMO "tank." This allows high damage classes such as the Warrior and Dervish to properly unleash their full potential while they are backed by such Monks. They can also call down damage with smiting skills.
Elementalist : A spellcasting profession specializing in the four elements (Air, Earth, Fire, Water). Depending on the specialization and choosing of a particular element, this class may be offensive, defensive, or a combination of both.
Necromancer : A spellcasting profession specializing in corpse exploitation, hexes, life stealing, and summoning undead minions.
Mesmer : A spellcasting profession specializing in energy manipulation, illusion and trickery to punish adversaries for performing (or in some cases not performing) certain actions.
All four of the campaign-specific non-core professions (Ritualist, Assassin, Paragon, and Dervish) can travel to Tyria via their port city, however these professions cannot be created in Tyria.
for more information on these forms of PvP.
s begin the game in the fictional idyllic kingdom of Ascalon, which serves as the tutorial content for new characters. The setting is friendly, with few aggressive monsters and a number of easily completed quests. New characters are introduced to the main protagonists of the multi-campaign Guild Wars story: the monk Mhenlo, the warrior Devona, the mage Cynn, the ranger Aidan, and the necromancer Eve. Player characters also interact with Prince Rurik (voiced by Robin Atkin Downes
), the heir apparent of the kingdom. After completing a number of initial quests and selecting a primary and a secondary profession
, the character is then inducted into the Ascalon Vanguard, an elite force led by the prince himself who are fighting the armies of the Charr beasts who are planning an invasion of Ascalon. During the final quest in this tutorial world, the Charr complete a ritual to unleash a rain of fire and stone upon the world, breaching Ascalon's defensive Great Wall, and reducing most of its cities to ruins. This in-game event, referred to as the Searing, transports the characters into a post-apocalyptic world of constant strife, with no way of returning to the pre-Searing areas. The mechanic employed in the Searing is often cited by ArenaNet as a primary benefit of the instanced design of Guild Wars, which allows world-changing and time-advancing stories to be told individually to player characters instead of requiring the game-world to be static and timeless.
In the post-Searing world, the initial portion of the non-tutorial plot sees the protagonists and player characters try to recover their footing against the Charr in the ruined kingdom of Ascalon. In a climactic event, Prince Rurik realizes the battle is lost, and beseeches the king to give the kingdom up and escape alive to the neighboring human kingdom of Kryta. The stalwart King Adelbern—his father—sees no merit in Rurik's plea, and banishes the prince for daring to suggest abandoning his country. A few refugees, including the protagonists and player characters, follow the now-exiled Rurik to Kryta; during the trip, Rurik is trapped and slain by the Stone Summit dwarves, a xenophobic faction who seek to control the passes through the Shiverpeak Mountains and are waging war against the other human-allied Deldrimor Dwarves.
The protagonists arrive in Kryta leaderless and attempt to set up a refugee settlement. Soon, they become involved in the war brimming between the White Mantle who govern Kryta and an army of undead, led by an Undead Lich, who are laying waste to the Krytan countryside. During a sequence of missions, the players help the Mantle hold back the undead, for which they are rewarded by being allowed to participate in a Choosing ceremony. During the ceremony, it is revealed that the Mantle are actually murderers who worship obscure evil beings and use the souls of the slain Chosen villagers to power arcane magical devices. The protagonists quickly decide to join a resistance organisation known as the Shining Blade and put an end to the Mantle. This plot twist also introduces the vizier Khilbron of the destroyed divine kingdom of Orr. However the White Mantle are more powerful than expected, and after some successes by the player they call upon their masters, a powerful race of beings known as the Mursaat, to destroy the Shining Blade and drive the players out of Kryta.
Vizier Khilbron helps the players escape to the Crystal Desert to partake in the ritual of Ascension. This is the first step to them fulfilling the Flameseeker Prophecies. Ascension consists of a sequence of missions with various victory conditions that simulate the player versus player
mode of the Guild Wars game, with NPCs instead of other players. One mission, for instance, requires the players to annihilate a number of other "teams" of NPCs in a simulation of deathmatch
; another has them hold an altar against a siege, which is one of the victory conditions in the Hall of Heroes PvP game. The final ascension mission requires the player character to defeat its exact double, forcing players to choose their skills wisely and be mindful of their counter skills. These ascension missions are an obvious tutorial for the competitive Tomb of the Primeval Kings(renamed to "Heroes' Ascent" after Guild Wars Factions release) arena, which initially was accessible immediately after ascending. (This arena was later moved off the continent of Tyria in a prelude to the Factions
release that consolidated all core PvP arenas in a separate location called the Battle Isles.)
After ascension, the players have an audience with the ancient dragon Glint, the author of the Flameseeker Prophecy. She aids them in a sequence of missions against the Mantle and the Mursaat, leading eventually to the volcano where "the power to destroy Good and Evil" is kept sealed. At the urging of Khilbron, the players storm the Mursaat stronghold built around the volcano and release the seals on the door, releasing the Titans, an army of powerful beings of fire from beneath the earth. Khilbron then reveals himself as the evil Lich Lord who was leading the undead in Kryta and who has been manipulating the player since they arrived from Ascalon. He reveals that he is the Flameseeker in the prophecy, not the player, and takes command of the titans and orders them to attack all of Tyria. The players then defeat him in the final mission of the campaign, using his life force to seal the Titans back in their prison.
And so the prophecy is fully fulfilled. The evil Mursaat have been destroyed by the player and the Titans. The Lich's life energy is enough to keep the Titans imprisoned for millennia, removing the need to sacrifice Chosen to maintain the seal.
Sorrow's Furnace
Released half a year after the campaign, the free Sorrow's Furnace expansion returned players to the Shiverpeak mountains, specifically to the caverns underneath it. There, they participate in a sequence of quests with the final goal of defeating the Iron forgeman, an immense automaton used by the Stone Summit dwarves to drive their war effort. Sorrow's Furnace introduced "unique items" to Guild Wars: these are items of set stats dropped by bosses. This model was repeated and expanded in the following Factions
, Nightfall
and Eye of the North
releases.
Gods' Realms
Prophecies also introduced two high-end dungeons that have been present in every subsequent Guild Wars release: the Fissure of Woe and the Underworld. These areas are accessible by the avatars of the in-game gods (for a small game-currency fee), and contains some of the most prestigious weapons and armor in the game series. It is, therefore, one of the most intensively farm
ed areas of the game.
's Best PC RPG and GameSpy
's MMORPG of the Year awards. In 2006 Computer Games Magazine
listed Prophecies as #4 in their Best Game collection, giving it in addition the Best MMO Debut and Best Technology awards. Guild Wars has been listed in every major Editors' Choice category in both print and online publications. As of August 2007; Prophecies and the two subsequent campaigns Guild Wars Factions
and Guild Wars Nightfall
have together sold more than 5 million copies.
Published criticism of Prophecies has centered around the following key elements. First, that the number and placement of creatures encountered in the PvE world can be overwhelming, especially since the party size and number of skills are both limited to eight. There is also a related problem of repetitiveness, as noted by IGN: "As fun as combat is, and as pretty as it looks, plowing your way through low-level mobs can and will get tiresome, since they don't give much (if any) experience points and will be dropping items that are virtually useless to you." This problem is lessened however by the fact that a player can freely and instantly teleport into any cities in the game their character has previously visited.
Secondly, several reviews (such as IGN's) have cited the lack of a sophisticated in-game trading system such as auction houses as exist in other MMORPGs, so the only way for players to sell items is to advertise on a trade channel that is shared by all players in the same map but may be muted by individual players. (This issue has been addressed to some extent with the recent addition of an in-game trading interface). IGN's review comments, additionally, that itemization in the game lacks variety because the only way to distinguish suits of armor is by dying them different colors.
Thirdly, both players and published reviews have commented on the unnatural coupling of cooperative and competitive matches, which require very different playing styles. At the game's release, PvP focused players were required to "unlock" their skills and items by playing through the cooperative game, even though a PvP player may have no interest in cooperative gaming. This issue, however, has been addressed by ArenaNet, firstly by introducing Balthazar Faction in June 2005 which enabled unlocking through playing PvP and further in August 2006 by making skill unlocks for the individual professions of the Prophecies campaign available in the game's online store. Unlocks for the professions of the Factions and Nightfall campaigns are also now available.
In addition to the standard edition, there are many other editions of Guild Wars: Prophecies available on the market. All of them contain the basic Account Creation Code and Manuscript Book, as well as other added features listed below,
Pre-order Edition : The Pre-order
edition was a disc available for purchase as a stand alone short duration access, or obtained by pre-ordering the full version of the game. The key allowed the player to access the Guild Wars beta testing. Added to a full account the key gives the player access to a unique weapon or offhand customized for their account.
Collector's Edition : The Collector's Edition was available for purchase at the games official release. The Collector's Edition comes with a Guild Wars branded Logitech headset, a free 3-month trial for Teamspeak's
"SpeakEasy" service, the soundtrack by Jeremy Soule
on an audio CD, The Art of Guild Wars Book 1 and Divine Aura, a glowing light around the hands of a character when they use an emote.
Special Edition : The Special Edition contains a (PvP) Skill Pack code which allows 7 regular skills, 1 elite skill, and 2 runes to be unlocked for the account from a Priest of Balthazar. The Special Edition also contains a special music-code to access in-game music from DirectSong.com, the Official Guild Wars Soundtrack CD, The Art of Guild Wars Book 2 and a map of Tyria.
Game of the Year Edition : The Game of the Year Edition contains the full version of Guild Wars: Prophecies, and was released one year after the game's initial release. It contains an access key which unlocks seven exclusive weapons and accessories, each geared towards one of the six core professions. Each weapon has maximum damage stats according to its type, and each character created can get a customized copy of the weapons. This version was released as the One Million Edition in Europe and is also available as an upgrade to any earlier Prophecies editions via the online store.
PvP Edition : This edition of Guild Wars is available for the three released campaigns, and is only available from the online store. This version has all of the skills and professions available in the respective version unlocked, but does not allow the player access to the PvE campaign and areas. The edition may be purchased as a stand-alone game, or may be added to an existing account. (Skills may be used by heroes.)
Guild Wars Platinum Edition : Guild Wars Platinum Edition is a bundle containing both the Prophecies campaign and the Eye of the North expansion. It was released with Eye of the North on August 31, 2007.
Many of the earlier editions are marketed simply as Guild Wars, which is how Guild Wars: Prophecies was initially known.
Guild Wars
Guild Wars is an episodic series of online 3D fantasy role-playing games developed by ArenaNet and published by NCsoft. Although often defined as an MMORPG the developers define it as a CORPG due to significant differences from the MMORPG genre. It provides two main modes of gameplay—a cooperative...
series of Action RPG
Action role-playing game
Action role-playing games form a loosely defined sub-genre of role-playing video games that incorporate elements of action or action-adventure games, emphasizing real-time action where the player has direct control over characters, instead of turn-based or menu-based combat...
s, developed by the Seattle
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
-based ArenaNet
ArenaNet
ArenaNet is a computer game developer and part of NCsoft Corporation, founded in 2000 by Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain and located in Bellevue, Washington...
game developer studio, a subsidiary of South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
n game publisher NCsoft
NCsoft
NCsoft is a South Korea-based online video game company, which has published massively multiplayer online role-playing games including Lineage, City of Heroes, Wildstar, Exteel, Guild Wars and Aion.-History:...
. Prophecies introduced players to the world of Guild Wars, known as Tyria, and premiered several elements that are now known as core components of the Guild Wars games.
Like all Guild Wars campaigns, Prophecies contains a co-operative role-playing portion and a competitive Player versus Player
Player versus player
Player versus player, or PvP, is a type of multiplayer interactive conflict within a game between two or more live participants. This is in contrast to games where players compete against computer controlled opponents, which is correspondingly referred to as player versus environment...
(PvP) portion. Co-operative characters may be used in the competitive portion, or new PvP-specific characters may be created at maximum level
Experience point
An experience point is a unit of measurement used in many role-playing games and role-playing video games to quantify a player character's progression through the game...
and all skills unlocked to the accounts.
Professions
Guild Wars: Prophecies introduced the six core professions of the game. These are:Warrior : A melee weapon-wielding character with a high armor level specializing in melee attacks. Unlike many MMOs where melee classes are often used as "tanks", the Warrior's specialty is offense, due to their primary attribute increasing the effectiveness of their attacks, with well-designed builds giving them the highest overall DPS in the game. Their energy management relies on "adrenal skills" which are skills that are charged up by attacking foes, rather than requiring energy to use.
Ranger : A bow-wielding character of high resilience specializing in ranged attacks, utility, and disruption. Also able to be accompanied by a pet.
Monk : A spellcasting profession specializing in defensive and healing arts. A key element to the monk lies in their Protection Prayers line, which eliminates the need for a typical MMO "tank." This allows high damage classes such as the Warrior and Dervish to properly unleash their full potential while they are backed by such Monks. They can also call down damage with smiting skills.
Elementalist : A spellcasting profession specializing in the four elements (Air, Earth, Fire, Water). Depending on the specialization and choosing of a particular element, this class may be offensive, defensive, or a combination of both.
Necromancer : A spellcasting profession specializing in corpse exploitation, hexes, life stealing, and summoning undead minions.
Mesmer : A spellcasting profession specializing in energy manipulation, illusion and trickery to punish adversaries for performing (or in some cases not performing) certain actions.
All four of the campaign-specific non-core professions (Ritualist, Assassin, Paragon, and Dervish) can travel to Tyria via their port city, however these professions cannot be created in Tyria.
Player versus Player
Prophecies introduced the core competitive modes of Guild Wars: the Random Arenas with randomly assigned teams, the Team Arenas for four-on-four team combat, a global continuously running tournament arena for teams of 8 called Heroes' Ascent, and the ranked strategic Guild Battles mode. Initially the arenas were situated in the co-operative world, but they were subsequently removed to the separate Battle Isles designed solely for PvP combat, which is accessible from every campaign in the Guild Wars sequence. See Guild WarsGuild Wars
Guild Wars is an episodic series of online 3D fantasy role-playing games developed by ArenaNet and published by NCsoft. Although often defined as an MMORPG the developers define it as a CORPG due to significant differences from the MMORPG genre. It provides two main modes of gameplay—a cooperative...
for more information on these forms of PvP.
Co-operative missions
The main component of the co-operative story in Prophecies is told through a sequence of 25 storyline missions. Each mission consists of certain objectives that have to be fulfilled by a team of four to eight player characters and player-managed NPCs. The missions take place in a variety of virtual environments as the player progresses across the game world.Story
Player characterPlayer character
A player character or playable character is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game. A player character is a persona of the player who controls it. Player characters...
s begin the game in the fictional idyllic kingdom of Ascalon, which serves as the tutorial content for new characters. The setting is friendly, with few aggressive monsters and a number of easily completed quests. New characters are introduced to the main protagonists of the multi-campaign Guild Wars story: the monk Mhenlo, the warrior Devona, the mage Cynn, the ranger Aidan, and the necromancer Eve. Player characters also interact with Prince Rurik (voiced by Robin Atkin Downes
Robin Atkin Downes
Born in London, England, Robin Atkin Downes is an English actor who is one of the most prolific voice-over actors in Los Angeles. He is well known for his work in film, television and voice acting...
), the heir apparent of the kingdom. After completing a number of initial quests and selecting a primary and a secondary profession
Character class
In role-playing games, a common method of arbitrating the capabilities of different game characters is to assign each one to a character class. A character class aggregates several abilities and aptitudes, and may also sometimes detail aspects of background and social standing or impose behaviour...
, the character is then inducted into the Ascalon Vanguard, an elite force led by the prince himself who are fighting the armies of the Charr beasts who are planning an invasion of Ascalon. During the final quest in this tutorial world, the Charr complete a ritual to unleash a rain of fire and stone upon the world, breaching Ascalon's defensive Great Wall, and reducing most of its cities to ruins. This in-game event, referred to as the Searing, transports the characters into a post-apocalyptic world of constant strife, with no way of returning to the pre-Searing areas. The mechanic employed in the Searing is often cited by ArenaNet as a primary benefit of the instanced design of Guild Wars, which allows world-changing and time-advancing stories to be told individually to player characters instead of requiring the game-world to be static and timeless.
In the post-Searing world, the initial portion of the non-tutorial plot sees the protagonists and player characters try to recover their footing against the Charr in the ruined kingdom of Ascalon. In a climactic event, Prince Rurik realizes the battle is lost, and beseeches the king to give the kingdom up and escape alive to the neighboring human kingdom of Kryta. The stalwart King Adelbern—his father—sees no merit in Rurik's plea, and banishes the prince for daring to suggest abandoning his country. A few refugees, including the protagonists and player characters, follow the now-exiled Rurik to Kryta; during the trip, Rurik is trapped and slain by the Stone Summit dwarves, a xenophobic faction who seek to control the passes through the Shiverpeak Mountains and are waging war against the other human-allied Deldrimor Dwarves.
The protagonists arrive in Kryta leaderless and attempt to set up a refugee settlement. Soon, they become involved in the war brimming between the White Mantle who govern Kryta and an army of undead, led by an Undead Lich, who are laying waste to the Krytan countryside. During a sequence of missions, the players help the Mantle hold back the undead, for which they are rewarded by being allowed to participate in a Choosing ceremony. During the ceremony, it is revealed that the Mantle are actually murderers who worship obscure evil beings and use the souls of the slain Chosen villagers to power arcane magical devices. The protagonists quickly decide to join a resistance organisation known as the Shining Blade and put an end to the Mantle. This plot twist also introduces the vizier Khilbron of the destroyed divine kingdom of Orr. However the White Mantle are more powerful than expected, and after some successes by the player they call upon their masters, a powerful race of beings known as the Mursaat, to destroy the Shining Blade and drive the players out of Kryta.
Vizier Khilbron helps the players escape to the Crystal Desert to partake in the ritual of Ascension. This is the first step to them fulfilling the Flameseeker Prophecies. Ascension consists of a sequence of missions with various victory conditions that simulate the player versus player
Player versus player
Player versus player, or PvP, is a type of multiplayer interactive conflict within a game between two or more live participants. This is in contrast to games where players compete against computer controlled opponents, which is correspondingly referred to as player versus environment...
mode of the Guild Wars game, with NPCs instead of other players. One mission, for instance, requires the players to annihilate a number of other "teams" of NPCs in a simulation of deathmatch
Deathmatch (gaming)
Deathmatch or Player vs All is a widely-used gameplay mode integrated into many shooter and real-time strategy computer games...
; another has them hold an altar against a siege, which is one of the victory conditions in the Hall of Heroes PvP game. The final ascension mission requires the player character to defeat its exact double, forcing players to choose their skills wisely and be mindful of their counter skills. These ascension missions are an obvious tutorial for the competitive Tomb of the Primeval Kings(renamed to "Heroes' Ascent" after Guild Wars Factions release) arena, which initially was accessible immediately after ascending. (This arena was later moved off the continent of Tyria in a prelude to the Factions
Guild Wars Factions
Guild Wars Factions is an Action RPG released in 2006 by ArenaNet, the second in the Guild Wars series. Factions introduces the continent of Cantha where two warring factions, the Luxons and the Kurzicks, are locked in a global persistent war...
release that consolidated all core PvP arenas in a separate location called the Battle Isles.)
After ascension, the players have an audience with the ancient dragon Glint, the author of the Flameseeker Prophecy. She aids them in a sequence of missions against the Mantle and the Mursaat, leading eventually to the volcano where "the power to destroy Good and Evil" is kept sealed. At the urging of Khilbron, the players storm the Mursaat stronghold built around the volcano and release the seals on the door, releasing the Titans, an army of powerful beings of fire from beneath the earth. Khilbron then reveals himself as the evil Lich Lord who was leading the undead in Kryta and who has been manipulating the player since they arrived from Ascalon. He reveals that he is the Flameseeker in the prophecy, not the player, and takes command of the titans and orders them to attack all of Tyria. The players then defeat him in the final mission of the campaign, using his life force to seal the Titans back in their prison.
And so the prophecy is fully fulfilled. The evil Mursaat have been destroyed by the player and the Titans. The Lich's life energy is enough to keep the Titans imprisoned for millennia, removing the need to sacrifice Chosen to maintain the seal.
Sorrow's Furnace
Released half a year after the campaign, the free Sorrow's Furnace expansion returned players to the Shiverpeak mountains, specifically to the caverns underneath it. There, they participate in a sequence of quests with the final goal of defeating the Iron forgeman, an immense automaton used by the Stone Summit dwarves to drive their war effort. Sorrow's Furnace introduced "unique items" to Guild Wars: these are items of set stats dropped by bosses. This model was repeated and expanded in the following Factions
Guild Wars Factions
Guild Wars Factions is an Action RPG released in 2006 by ArenaNet, the second in the Guild Wars series. Factions introduces the continent of Cantha where two warring factions, the Luxons and the Kurzicks, are locked in a global persistent war...
, Nightfall
Guild Wars Nightfall
Guild Wars Nightfall is a fantasy Action RPG and the third stand-alone campaign in the Guild Wars computer game series developed by Seattle-based game developer studio ArenaNet, a subsidiary of NCSoft corporation...
and Eye of the North
Guild Wars: Eye of the North
Guild Wars: Eye of the North is an expansion pack to the Action RPG Guild Wars made by the Seattle-based ArenaNet studio, a subsidiary of NCSoft. It was released worldwide on August 31, 2007. Unlike other games in the Guild Wars sequence, Eye of the North requires players to own one of the earlier...
releases.
Gods' Realms
Prophecies also introduced two high-end dungeons that have been present in every subsequent Guild Wars release: the Fissure of Woe and the Underworld. These areas are accessible by the avatars of the in-game gods (for a small game-currency fee), and contains some of the most prestigious weapons and armor in the game series. It is, therefore, one of the most intensively farm
Gold farming
Gold farming is playing a massively multiplayer online game to acquire in-game currency which is then sold to other players. People in China and in other developing nations have held full-time employment as gold farmers....
ed areas of the game.
Critical response
Guild Wars: Prophecies has been well received by critics and players alike, especially for its attractive character designs. In 2005, it won several prestigious awards including IGNIGN
IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...
's Best PC RPG and GameSpy
GameSpy
GameSpy Industries, Inc., known simply as GameSpy, is a division of IGN Entertainment, which operates a network of game websites and provides online video game-related services and software. GameSpy dates back to the 1996 release of an internet Quake server search program named QSpy. The current...
's MMORPG of the Year awards. In 2006 Computer Games Magazine
Computer Games Magazine
Computer Games Magazine was a computer gaming print magazine. It was formerly Computer Games Strategy Plus, and before that, Strategy Plus, which had been founded as Games International in the UK in 1988. While its initial focus was on strategy games, it covered a wide range of game genres...
listed Prophecies as #4 in their Best Game collection, giving it in addition the Best MMO Debut and Best Technology awards. Guild Wars has been listed in every major Editors' Choice category in both print and online publications. As of August 2007; Prophecies and the two subsequent campaigns Guild Wars Factions
Guild Wars Factions
Guild Wars Factions is an Action RPG released in 2006 by ArenaNet, the second in the Guild Wars series. Factions introduces the continent of Cantha where two warring factions, the Luxons and the Kurzicks, are locked in a global persistent war...
and Guild Wars Nightfall
Guild Wars Nightfall
Guild Wars Nightfall is a fantasy Action RPG and the third stand-alone campaign in the Guild Wars computer game series developed by Seattle-based game developer studio ArenaNet, a subsidiary of NCSoft corporation...
have together sold more than 5 million copies.
Published criticism of Prophecies has centered around the following key elements. First, that the number and placement of creatures encountered in the PvE world can be overwhelming, especially since the party size and number of skills are both limited to eight. There is also a related problem of repetitiveness, as noted by IGN: "As fun as combat is, and as pretty as it looks, plowing your way through low-level mobs can and will get tiresome, since they don't give much (if any) experience points and will be dropping items that are virtually useless to you." This problem is lessened however by the fact that a player can freely and instantly teleport into any cities in the game their character has previously visited.
Secondly, several reviews (such as IGN's) have cited the lack of a sophisticated in-game trading system such as auction houses as exist in other MMORPGs, so the only way for players to sell items is to advertise on a trade channel that is shared by all players in the same map but may be muted by individual players. (This issue has been addressed to some extent with the recent addition of an in-game trading interface). IGN's review comments, additionally, that itemization in the game lacks variety because the only way to distinguish suits of armor is by dying them different colors.
Thirdly, both players and published reviews have commented on the unnatural coupling of cooperative and competitive matches, which require very different playing styles. At the game's release, PvP focused players were required to "unlock" their skills and items by playing through the cooperative game, even though a PvP player may have no interest in cooperative gaming. This issue, however, has been addressed by ArenaNet, firstly by introducing Balthazar Faction in June 2005 which enabled unlocking through playing PvP and further in August 2006 by making skill unlocks for the individual professions of the Prophecies campaign available in the game's online store. Unlocks for the professions of the Factions and Nightfall campaigns are also now available.
Editions
In addition to the standard edition, there are many other editions of Guild Wars: Prophecies available on the market. All of them contain the basic Account Creation Code and Manuscript Book, as well as other added features listed below,
Pre-order Edition : The Pre-order
Pre-order
A pre-order is an order placed for an item which has not yet been released. The idea for pre-orders came when people found it hard to get popular items in stores due to their popularity. Companies were then given the idea to allow people to reserve their own personal copy, before the release, ...
edition was a disc available for purchase as a stand alone short duration access, or obtained by pre-ordering the full version of the game. The key allowed the player to access the Guild Wars beta testing. Added to a full account the key gives the player access to a unique weapon or offhand customized for their account.
Collector's Edition : The Collector's Edition was available for purchase at the games official release. The Collector's Edition comes with a Guild Wars branded Logitech headset, a free 3-month trial for Teamspeak's
TeamSpeak
TeamSpeak is a proprietary Voice over IP software that allows users to speak on a chat channel with other users, much like a telephone conference call. A TeamSpeak user will often wear a headset with an integrated microphone...
"SpeakEasy" service, the soundtrack by Jeremy Soule
Jeremy Soule
Jeremy Soule is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television and video games. He has won multiple awards and has been described as the "John Williams of video game music" and "a model of success" for Western composers. He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen...
on an audio CD, The Art of Guild Wars Book 1 and Divine Aura, a glowing light around the hands of a character when they use an emote.
Special Edition : The Special Edition contains a (PvP) Skill Pack code which allows 7 regular skills, 1 elite skill, and 2 runes to be unlocked for the account from a Priest of Balthazar. The Special Edition also contains a special music-code to access in-game music from DirectSong.com, the Official Guild Wars Soundtrack CD, The Art of Guild Wars Book 2 and a map of Tyria.
Game of the Year Edition : The Game of the Year Edition contains the full version of Guild Wars: Prophecies, and was released one year after the game's initial release. It contains an access key which unlocks seven exclusive weapons and accessories, each geared towards one of the six core professions. Each weapon has maximum damage stats according to its type, and each character created can get a customized copy of the weapons. This version was released as the One Million Edition in Europe and is also available as an upgrade to any earlier Prophecies editions via the online store.
PvP Edition : This edition of Guild Wars is available for the three released campaigns, and is only available from the online store. This version has all of the skills and professions available in the respective version unlocked, but does not allow the player access to the PvE campaign and areas. The edition may be purchased as a stand-alone game, or may be added to an existing account. (Skills may be used by heroes.)
Guild Wars Platinum Edition : Guild Wars Platinum Edition is a bundle containing both the Prophecies campaign and the Eye of the North expansion. It was released with Eye of the North on August 31, 2007.
Many of the earlier editions are marketed simply as Guild Wars, which is how Guild Wars: Prophecies was initially known.